Citizen Soldiers: The U S Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulg

About the book

From Stephen E. Ambrose, bestselling author of Band of Brothers and D-Day, the inspiring story of the ordinary men of the U.S. army in northwest Europe from the day after D-Day until the end of the bitterest days of World War II.

In this riveting account, historian Stephen E. Ambrose continues where he left off in his #1 bestseller D-Day.Citizen Soldiers opens at 0001 hours, June 7, 1944, on the Normandy beaches, and ends at 0245 hours, May 7, 1945, with the allied victory. It is biography of the US Army in the European Theater of Operations, and Ambrose again follows the individual characters of this noble, brutal, and tragic war. From the high command down to the ordinary soldier, Ambrose draws on hundreds of interviews to re-create the war experience with startling clarity and immediacy. From the hedgerows of Normandy to the overrunning of Germany, Ambrose tells the real story of World War II from the perspective of the men and women who fought it.read more

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Readers' Reviews

seriousgrace

Stephen Ambrose has the uncanny ability to take you back in time. His words pick you up and carry you hook, line and sinker, back to June 7, 1944 and forward through the great and terrible World War II. However, Citizen Soldiers is not a dry account of strategic war manuevers. It is not a blah blah blah play by play of how Germany's armies moved along the western/eastern slope while the Allies pushed further north or south. Those things did happen but Citizen Solders is more than that. It's as if you have been dropped in the middle of hand to hand skirmishes or have the ability to eavesdrop on Hitler's frequent phone arguments with a subordinate. You get to know people, places and events as if you are talking to the soldiers themselves, dodging bullets in the snow-covered country side, and witnesses skirmishes first hand. For once, the photographs and maps included do not make the storytelling vivid, they only enhance the words.read more

Oh how I love primary sources. This book certainly deserves reading by people interested in World War II, by people curious about their forebears' generation, and by people who love letters and interviews.While Ambrose was later attacked for sloppy scholarship, that shouldn't detract from the power of the first person narratives in this book. Ambrose spreads out context like a cloth and then lays out these brief jewels of real emotion and exprience. (Man, am I gushing: anyway, it's a good read.)Readers -- especially those just starting their study of WWII in Europe -- may benefit from having another book handy to explain the sequence of events of the war and to provide a good map.read more

Critics' Reviews

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Publishers Weekly

The story of the front-line American combatants who took WWII to the Germans from Normandy to the Elbe River makes, in Ambrose's expert hands, for an outstanding sequel to his D-Day (1994). These men are frequently dismissed as winning victories by firepower rather than acknowledged for their individual fighting power. Using interviews and other personal accounts by both German and American participants, Ambrose tells instead the story of enlisted men and junior officers who not only mastered the battlefield but developed emotional resources that endured and transcended the shocks of modern combat. Ambrose's accounts of the fighting in Normandy, the breakout and the bitter autumn struggles for Aachen and the battles in the Huertgen Forest and around Metz depict an army depending not on generalship but on the courage, skill and adaptability of small-unit commanders and their men. The 1945 offensive into Germany was a triumph of a citizen army, but the price was high. One infantry company landed in Normandy on August 8 with 187 men and six officers. By V-E Day, 625 men had served in its ranks. Fifty-one had been killed, 183 wounded and 167 suffered frostbite or trench foot. Nor do statistics tell the whole story. Ambrose's reconstruction of "a night on the line" is a brilliant evocation of physical hardship and emotional isolation that left no foxhole veteran unscarred. It is good to be reminded of brave men's brave deeds with the eloquence and insight that the author brings to this splendid, generously illustrated and moving history. Photos. 250,000 first printing; BOMC and History Book Club main selections, QPB alternate; Reader's Digest Condensed Book. (Nov.) FYI: In an outpouring of Ambrosia, the author has two other books scheduled for fall publication. They are reviewed below. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved